Sneering at Courage:

One of the overdue lessons of 9/11 is that we can't afford to sneer
at physical courage any more. The willingness of New York firemen,
Special Forces troops in Afghanistan, and the passengers of Flight 93
to put their lives on the line has given us most of the bright spots
we've had in the war against terror. We are learning, once again,
that all that stands between us and the night of barbarism is the
willingness of men to both risk their lives and take the awful
responsibility of using lethal force in our defense.

(And, usually, it is men who do the risking. I mean no disrespect
to our sisters; the kind of courage I am talking about is not an
exclusive male monopoly. But it has been predominently the job of
men in every human culture since Olduvai Gorge, and still is today.
I'll return to this point later in the essay.)

The rediscovery of courage visibly upsets a large class of bien
pensants in our culture. Many of the elite molders of opinion in
the U.S and Europe do not like or trust physical courage in men. They
have spent decades training us to consider it regressive, consigning
it to fantasy, sneering at it — trying to persuade us all that
it's at best an adolescent or brute virtue, perhaps even a vice.

If this seems too strong an indictment, consider carefully all the
connotations of the phrase "testosterone poisoning". Ask yourself
when you first heard it, and where, and from whom. Then ask yourself
if you have slid into the habit of writing off as bluster any man's
declaration that he is willing to risk his life, willing to fight for
what he believes in. When some ordinary man says he is willing to
take on the likes of the 9/11 hijackers or the D.C. sniper — or
even ordinary criminals — them, do you praise his determination
or consign him, too, to the category of blowhard or barbarian?

Like all virtues, courage thrives on social support. If we mock
our would-be warriors, writing them off as brutes or rednecks or
simpletons, we'll find courage in short supply when we need it. If we
make the more subtle error of sponsoring courage only in uniformed men
— cops, soldiers, firemen — we'll find that we have
trouble growing the quantity or quality we need in a crisis. Worse:
our brave men could come to see themselves apart from us, distrusted
and despised by the very people for whom they risk their lives, and
entitled to take their due when it is not freely given. More than one
culture that made that mistake has fallen to its own guardians.

Before 9/11, we were in serious danger of forgetting that courage
is a functional virtue in ordinary men. But Todd Beamer reminded us of
that — and now, awkwardly, we are rediscovering some of the
forms that humans have always used to nurture and reward male courage.
Remember that rash of news stories from New York about Upper-East-Side
socialites cruising firemen's bars? Biology tells; medals and
tickertape parades and bounties have their place, but the hero's most
natural and strongest reward is willing women.

Manifestations like this absolutely appall and disgust the sort of
people who think that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a
judgment on American sins; — the multiculturalists, the
postmodernists, the transnational progressives, radical feminists, the
academic political-correctness brigades, the Bush-is-a-moron elitists,
and the plain old-fashioned loony left. By and large these people
never liked or trusted physical courage, and it's worth taking a hard
look at why that is.

Feminists distrust physical courage because it's a male virtue.
Women can and do have it, but it is gender-linked to masculinity just
as surely as nurturance is to femininity. This has always been
understood even in cultures like the Scythians, Teutons, Japanese, and
modern Israelis that successfully made places for women warriors. If
one's world-view is organized around distrusting or despising men and
maleness, male courage is threatening and social support for it is
regressive.

For multi-culti and po-mo types, male physical courage is suspect
because it's psychologically linked to moral certitude — and
moral certitude is a bad thing, nigh-indistinguishable from
intolerance and bigotry. Men who believe in anything enough to fight
for it are automatically suspect of would-be imperialism &mdash,
unless, of course, they're tribesmen or Third Worlders, in which
fanaticism is a praiseworthy sign of authenticity.

Elite opinions about male physical courage have also had more
than a touch of class warfare about them. Every upper crust
that is not directly a military caste — including our own
— tends to dismiss physical courage as a trait of peasants
and proles and the lesser orders, acceptable only when they
know their place is to be guided by their betters.

For transnational progressives and the left in general, male
physical courage is a problem in the lesser orders because it's an
individualizing virtue, one that leads to wrong-think about
autonomy and the proper limits of social power. A man who develops in
himself the grit that it takes to face death and stare it down is less
likely to behave meekly towards bureacrats, meddlers, and taxmen who
have not passed that same test. Brave men who have learned to fight
for their own concept of virtue — independently of
social approval or the party line — are especially threatening
to any sort of collectivist.

The multiculturalist's and the collectivist's suspicions are
backhanded tributes to an important fact. There is a continuity among
self-respect, physical courage and ethical/moral courage. These virtues are
the soil of individualism, and are found at their strongest only in
individualists. They do not flourish in isolation from one another.
They reinforce each other, and the social measures we take to reward
any of them tend to increase all of them.

After 1945 we tried to separate these virtues. We tried to teach
boys moral steadfastness while also telling them that civilized men
are expected to avoid confrontation and leave coping with danger to
specialists. We preached the virtue of `self-esteem' to adolescents
while gradually abolishing almost all the challenges and ordeals that
might have enabled them to acquire genuine self-respect. Meanwhile,
our entertainments increasingly turned on anti-heros or celebrated
physical bravery of a completely mindless and morally vacuous kind.
We taught individualism without responsibility, denying the unpleasant
truth that freedom has to be earned and kept with struggle and blood.
And we denied the legitimacy of self-defense.

Rudyard Kipling would have known better, and Robert Heinlein did.
But they were written off as reactionaries — and many of us were
foolish enough to be surprised when the new thinking produced a bumper
crop of brutes, narcissists, overgrown boys, and bewildered hollow men
apt to fold under pressure. We became, in Jeffrey Snyder's famous
diagnosis, a nation
of cowards; the cost could be measured in the explosion in crime
rates after 1960, a phenomenon primarily of males between 15 and 35.

But this was a cost which, during the long chill of the Cold War,
we could afford. Such conflicts as there were stayed far away from
the home country, warfare was a game between nations, and nuclear
weapons seemed to make individual bravery irrelevant. So it remained
until al-Qaeda and the men of Flight 93 reminded us otherwise.

Now we have need of courage. Al-Qaeda's war has come to us. There
is a geopolitical aspect to it, and one of the fronts we must pursue
is to smash state sponsors of terrorism. But this war is not
primarily a chess-game between nations — it's a street-level
brawl in which the attackers are individuals and small terrorist cells
often having no connection to the leadership of groups like al-Qaeda
other than by sympathy of ideas.

Defense against this kind of war will have to be decentralized and
citizen-centered, because the military and police simply cannot be
everywhere that terrorists might strike. John F. Kennedy said this during
the Cold War, but it is far truer now:

"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to
take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic
purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and
sacrifice for that freedom."

The linked virtues of physical courage, moral courage, and
self-respect are even more essential to a Minuteman's readiness than
his weapons. So the next time you see a man claim the role
of defender, don't sneer — cheer. Don't write him off with some
pseudo-profound crack about macho idiocy, support him. He's trying to
tool up for the job two million years of evolution designed him for,
fighting off predators so the women and children can sleep safe.

Whether he's in uniform or not, young or old, fit or flabby
— we need that courage now.

posted by Eric at 9:20 PM

Social Security and the Demography Bomb:

People used to have children to take care of them in their old age.
Social Security took care of this by socializing the benefits, but all
of the costs still fell to individuals; worse, taking time out of the
workforce to raise kids reduces your Social Security benefits.
Rational actors will stop having kids to have a good retirement.

He's right, and this applies to all public pension schemes.
It's a very simple, very powerful mechanism. When you subsidize old
age, you depress birthrates. The more you subsidize old age, the more
you depress birthrates. Eventually...crash!

It's not just Euro-socialism that's going to get trashed by
demographics, it's the U.S's own welfare state. It might take longer
here because our population is still rising, but it will happen.

Now that the effects of income transfer on demography are no longer
masked by the Long Boom, this is going to become one of the principal
constraints on public policy.

posted by Eric at 3:42 AM

Monday, December 02, 2002

Demographics and the Dustbin of History:

Karl Zinsmeister's essay Old and In
The Way presents a startling — but all too plausible — forecast of Europe's future. To the now-familiar evidence of European
insularity, reflexive anti-Americanism, muddle, and geopolitical
impotence, Zinsmeister adds a hard look at European demographic
trends.

What Zinsmeister sees coming is not pretty. European populations
are not having children at replacement levels. The population of
Europe is headed for collapse, and for an age profile heavily skewed
towards older people and retirees. Europe's Gross Domestic Product
per capita (roughly, the amount of wealth the average person produces)
is already only two-thirds of America's, and the ratio is going to
fall, not rise.

Meanwhile, the U.S population continues to rise — and the
U.S. economy is growing three times as fast as Europe's even though
the U.S. is in the middle of a bust! Since 1970 the U.S. has been
more than ten times as successful at creating new jobs. But most
impportantly, the U.S.'s population is still growing even as Europe's
is shrinking — which means the gap in population, productivity,
and economic output is going to increase. By 2030, the
U.S will have a larger population than all of Europe — and
the median age in the U.S. will be 30, but the median age in Europe
will be over 50.

Steven den Beste is probably correct to
diagnose the steady weakening of Europe as the underlying cause of
the increasing rift the U.S. and Europe's elites noted in Robert
Kagan's essay Power
and Weakness (also recommended reading). But Kagan (focusing on
diplomacy and geopolitics), Zinsmeister (focusing on demographic and
economic decline) and den Beste (focusing on the lassitude of Europe's
technology sector and the resulting brain drain to the U.S.) all miss
something more fundamental.

Zinsmeister comes near it when he writes "Europe's disinterest in
childbearing is a crisis of confidence and optimism.". Europeans
are demonstrating in their behavior that they don't believe the
future will be good for children.

Back to that in a bit, but first a look on what the demographic
collapse will mean for European domestic politics. Zinsmeister
makes the following pertinent observations:

Percentage of GDP represented by government spending is also
diverging. In the U.S. it is roughly 19% and falling. In the
EU countries it is 30-40% and rising.

The ratio of state clients to wealth-generating workers is
also rising. By 2030, Zinsmeister notes, every single worker un the EU
will have his own elderly person 65 or older to provide for
through the public pension system.

Chronic unemployment is at 9-10% (twice the U.S.'s) and rising.

Long-term unemployment and drone status is far more common in
Europe than here. In Europe, 40% of unemployed have been out of
work for over a year. Un the U.S. the corresponding figure is 6%.

Zinsmeister doesn't state the obvious conclusion; Euro-socialism
is unsustainable. It's headed for the dustbin of history.

Forget ideological collapse; the numbers don't work.
The statistics above actually understate the magnitude of the problem,
because as more and more of the population become wards of the state,
a larger percentage of the able will be occupied simply with running
the income-redistribution system. The rules they make will depress
per-capita productivity further (for a recent example see France's
mandated 35-hour workweek).

Unless several of the key trends undergo a rapid and extreme
reversal, rather soon (as in 20 years at the outside) there won't be
enough productive people left to keep the gears of the
income-redistribution machine turning. Economic strains sufficient to
destroy the political system will become apparent much sooner. We may
be seeing the beginnings of the destruction now as Chancellor
Schröder's legitimacy evaporates in Germany, burned away by the
dismal economic news.

We know what this future will probably look like, because we now know
how the same dismal combination of economic/demographic collapse played out in
Russia in the 1980s and 1990s. Progressively more impotent
governments losing their popular legitimacy, increasing corruption,
redistributionism sliding into gangsterism. Slow-motion collapse.

But there are worse possibilities that are quite plausible. The EU
hase two major advantages the Soviets did not — a better tech
and infrastructure base, and a functioning civil society (e.g. one in
which wealth and information flow through a lot of legal grassroots
connections and voluntary organizations). But they have one major
disadvantage — large, angry, totally unassimilated immigrant
populations that are reproducing faster than the natives. This is
an especially severe problem in France, where housing developments
in the ring zones around all the major cities have become places
the police dare not go without heavy weapons.

We've already gotten a foretaste of what that might mean for
European domestic politics. At its most benign, we get Pim Fortuyn in
Holland. But Jörg Haider in Austria is a more ominous indicator,
and Jean-Marie Le Pen's startling success in the last French
presidential elections was downright frightening. Far-right populism
with a racialist/nativist/anti-Semitic tinge is on the rise, an
inevitable consequence of the demographic collapse of native
populations.

As if that isn't bad enough, al-Qaeda and other Islamist
organizations are suspected on strong evidence to be recruiting
heavily among the North African, Turkish, and Levantine populations
that now predominate in European immigrant quarters. The legions of
rootless, causeless, unemployed and angry young men among Muslim
immigrants may in fact actually be on their way to reifying the worst
nightmares of native-European racists.

One way or another, the cozy Euro-socialist welfare state is doomed
by the demographic collapse. Best case: it will grind to a shambolic
halt as the ratio of worker bees to drones goes below critical. Worst
case: it will blow itself apart in a welter of sectarian, ethnic, and
class violence. Watch the frequency trend curve of
synagogue-trashings and anti-Jewish hate crimes; that's bound to be a
leading indicator.

The only possible way for Europe to avoid one of these fates would
be for it to reverse either the decline in per-capita productivity
or its population decline. And reversing the per-capita productivity
decline would only be a temporary fix unless it could be made to rise
faster than the drone-to-worker ratio — forever.

Was this foredoomed? Can it be that all national populations lose
their will to have children when they get sufficiently comfortable?
Do economies inevitably grow old and sclerotic? Is Europe simply
aging into the end stages of a natural civilizational senescence?

That theory would be appealing to a lot of big-picture historians,
and to religious anti-materialists like al-Qaeda. And if we didn't
have the U.S.'s counterexample to look at, we might be tempted to
conclude that this trap is bound to claim any industrial society past
a certain stage of development.

But that won't wash. The U.S. is wealthier, both in aggregate and
per-capita, than Europe. A pro-market political party in Sweden
recently pointed out that by American standards of purchasing power,
most Swedes now live in what U.S. citizens would consider poverty. If
wealth caused decline, the U.S. would be further down the tubes than
the EU right now. But we're still growing.

A clue to the real problem lies in the differing degrees to which
social stability depends on income transfer. In the U.S.,
redistributionism is on the decline; we abolished federal welfare
nearly a decade ago, national health insurance was defeated, and new
entitlements are an increasingly tough political sell to a population
that has broadly bought into conservative arguments about them. In
fact, one of the major disputes everyone knows won't be avoidable much
longer is over privatizing Social Security — and opponents are
on the defensive.

In Europe, on the other hand, merely failing to raise state
pensions on schedule can cause nationwide riots. The dependent
population there is much larger, much longer-term, and has much
stronger claims on the other players in the political system. The
5%/10% difference in structural unemployment — and, even more,
the 6%/40% difference in permanant unemployment — tells
the story.

So what happened?

Essentially, Euro-socialism told the people that the State would
buy as much poverty and dependency as they cared to produce. Then it
made wealth creation difficult by keeping capital expensive, business
formation difficult, and labor markets rigid and regulated. Finally,
it taxed the bejesus out of the people who stayed off the dole and made
it through the redistributionist rat-maze, and used the proceeds to
buy more poverty and alienation.

Europeans responded to this set of incentives by not having
children. This isn't surprising. The same thing happened in Soviet
Russia, much sooner. There's a reason Stalin handed out medals to
women who raised big families.

Human birth rates rise under two circumstances. One is when people
think they need to have a lot of kids for any of them to survive. The
other is when human beings think their children will have it better
than they do. (The reasons for this pattern should be obvious; if
they aren't, go read about evolutionary biology until you get it.)

Europe's experiment with redistributionism has been running for
about a hundred and fifty years now (the beginnings of the modern
welfare state date to Prussian state-pension schemes in the 1840s).
Until recently, it was sustained by the long-term population and
productivity boom that followed the Industrial Revolution. There were
always more employed young people than old people and unemployed
people and sick people and indigents, so subsidizing the latter was
economically possible.

Until fairly recently, Euro-socialist governments couldn't suck
wealth out of the productive economy and into the redistribution
network fast enough to counter the effects of the long boom. Peoples'
estimate of the prospects for their children kept improving and they
kept breeding. In France they now call the late end of that period
les trentes glorieuses, the thirty glorious years from 1945 to
1975. But as the productivity gains from industrialization tailed
off, the demographic collapse began, not just in France but
Europe-wide.

Meanwhile, the U.S. was not only rejecting socialism, but domestic
politics actually moved away from redistributionism and
economic intervention after Nixon's wage/price control experiment
failed in 1971. The U.S, famously had its period of "malaise" in the
1970s after the oil-price shock ended our trentes
glorieuses— but while in Europe the socialists consolidated
their grip on public thinking during those years, our "democratic
socialists" didn't — and never recovered from Ronald Reagan's
two-term presidency after 1980.

The fall of the Soviet Union happened fifteen years after the
critical branch point. Until then, Westerners had no way to know that
the Soviets, too, had been in demographic decline for some time.
Communist myth successfully portrayed the Soviet Union as an
industrial and military powerhouse, but the reality was a hollow shell
with a failing population — a third-world pesthole with a space
program. Had that been clearer thirty years sooner, perhaps Europe
might have avoided the trap.

Now the millennium has turned and it looks like the experiment will
finally have to end. It won't be philosophy or rhetoric or the march
of armies that kills it, but rather the accumulated poisons of
redistributionism necrotizing not just the economy but the
demographics of Europe. Euro-socialism, in a quite Marxian turn of
events, will have been destroyed by its own internal contradictions.